Village
Montederramo is a concello in the Ourense comarca of Terra de Caldelas, with about 660 inhabitants, set at over 900 metres in the Sierra de San Mamede. It is dominated by the Cistercian monastery of Santa María, founded in the 12th century, which from 1582 housed a college of arts and philosophy; it preserves a 16th-century Renaissance cloister in the Hospedería and a church in a stern Herrerian style with splendid altarpieces. From this very monastery comes the document, now considered false, that first called this area «Ribeira Sacra». The municipality also preserves the Bidueiral, a dense birch forest, and holds the memory of a tragic episode from the postwar period, when the Guardia Civil burned the hamlets of O Teixedo and A Edreira after finding the trail of the last fugitives in hiding.
Monument
Benedictine monastery, and Cistercian from 1153, on a plateau at 920 metres of altitude, beside the Mao river, in the heart of the Ribeira Sacra, a comarca that takes its name from a document linked to this monastery, though today considered spurious. It is supposed to have been founded in the 10th century at a site different from the present one, San Xoán de Seoane Vello; it was refounded in 1124 by Tareixa of Portugal and, after joining the Cistercian reform promoted by Alfonso VII, it became one of the monasteries of greatest economic and social power in Galicia until the disentailment. It preserves a 16th-century Renaissance cloister, with round arches and a frieze of rosettes, linked to the regular cloister by a portico. Its Herrerian church, commissioned in 1598, has been a historic-artistic monument since 1951.
Monument
A sixteenth-century cloister combining Gothic and Renaissance solutions; Juan de la Sierra the elder designed its lower storey around 1575, and the second cloister, that of the guest house, was built together with the church.
Monument
A bridge of Roman origin preserved in the parish of Vilariño Frío, a testimony to the roads that crossed this high plateau, situated more than nine hundred metres above sea level.
Nature
A sierra that closes off the concello of Montederramo and which, according to tradition, owes its name to the hermit San Mamede, said to have lived on its heights; its brañas and high pastures comfortably exceed nine hundred metres, reaching the 1,618 of Fonte do Santo, where there is a chapel dedicated to the saint and a pilgrimage is held in the second week of August. It shares with the Serra de Queixa, the Serra do Fial das Corzas and the mountains of Invernadeiro the largest area of high mountain in Galicia, also spread across Baños de Molgas, Maceda and Villar de Barrio. It is protected as a Site of Community Importance within the Natura 2000 network and is in the process of being declared a nature park; it is home to deer, roe deer, wild boar and wolves, as well as eagles and other mountain birds.
Nature
The 135.57 square kilometres of the concello extend over a plateau lying at around 904 metres above sea level, a landscape of grasslands, heaths and villages scattered across thirteen parishes.
Curiosity
The oldest reliable reference to the monastery is from 1142, when Alfonso VII asked for Cistercian monks to reform it; the effective union with the Cistercian order did not take place until eleven years later.
Curiosity
On the south wall of the church, in the upper gallery of the cloister, a Romanesque window from the primitive building survives: almost the only visible remnant of the monastery prior to the great modern rebuilding.
Monument
At this place in the municipality stood the Benedictine house of San Xoán, of which there are notices until the middle of the 12th century and which is considered the original settlement of the community before its move.
Historical milestone
A document signed in Allariz in 1124 records the refoundation of the monastery by countess Teresa of Portugal; in that parchment appears written for the first time the name Rivoira Sacrata, the origin of the name Ribeira Sacra.
Historical milestone
King Alfonso VII asked his kinsman Bernard of Clairvaux in 1142 to send monks to implant the Cistercian reform; that request is the first historical reference that scholars consider fully reliable.
Curiosity
Tradition tells that the hermit who gives the hill its name hauled the stone of his chapel, on top of the range, with a cart drawn by tamed deer — stags in some versions, two trained roe deer in others — and that when a wolf devoured one of them he yoked it in its place until the work was finished.
Nature
It rises in the sierras of the central massif, on the northern slope of the Sierra de San Mamede, and passes by the monastery before narrowing on its way to the Sil, through a valley of oak woods where mills and walls from old hydraulic works can still be seen. It flows north through places such as Sabín, Veredo, Nogueira and Pedrafita until it meets the Sil near Cristosende, between the concellos of A Teixeira and Parada de Sil. It forms a single reservoir, that of Leboreiro, with a small hydroelectric plant known as A Fábrica da Luz near the mouth, and in its final stretch it carves out one of the most impressive canyons in the province of Ourense, dropping from 860 metres at Leboreiro to 240 metres at the Sil.
Historical milestone
The 1836 Mendizábal disentailment put an end to the Cistercian community of Montederramo and put the monastery's property up for public auction; much of it was bought by a merchant from Ourense, the church remained as the parish church, and the rest passed into private hands.
Nature
Dammed in 1949 with a gravity dam on the río Mao, it holds some four cubic hectometres and spreads a sheet of water of about 57 hectares among the high lands of the concello, upstream of the canyon.